Anyone who surfs the Internet regularly has seen it: the virulently anti-Israel comments that follow many an article in mainstream publications featuring the words"Israel" or "Jew."

Now, in a follow-up to his controversial Tablet column last week accusing major publications of cynically exploiting anti-Israel commentary to increase Internet traffic, Lee Smith explains how he believes this mechanism works.

"Everyone knows that the media is reeling," he writes. "For instance, New York Times staffers recently took a 5 percent pay cut after a hundred of their colleagues were laid off...None of the big media companies has figured out how to make their Internet presence into a profit center that can sustain operations, even as they turn their hallowed brand-names over to opinion bloggers who can generate copy at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional reporting."

The anti-Israel market, writes Smith, is "one of the most attractive niche markets in this trade" because its audience is passionate, interested in news and "can generate immediate and measurable results—page views, hits, and comments."

Smith does not accuse anti-Israel bloggers themselves of being anti-Semitic: "I can no more discern what these bloggers really think about Jews than I can know whether they are thinking about the color blue or green."

Rather, he suggests that bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Phillip Weiss and Stephen Walt get unprecedented numbers of readers when they turn their attention to Israel and Zionism.

Andrew Sullivan, for instance, is currently ranked 15th in “standing & influence” in the entire blogosphere, writes Smith, and this is in large part due to the kinds of passionate and vile comments his posts attract. Media companies, in turn, turn a blind eye to the invective spewed on their sites because the lure of page views is too irresistible.